Previews

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix

The demo for the sci-fi sequel to Puzzle Quest shows how much the world changes in the future.

Spiffy:

New game types; six degress of freedom.

Iffy:

Still a bit confusing for newbies.

The gaming industry sometimes seems married to the idea that "more is better." But bigger budgets do not by themselves make a game great. Witness the original Puzzle Quest, a little game that attached a sort of competitive RPG structure to classic Bejeweled-style gameplay and became the digital crack of choice for a surprisingly large cross-section of the GameSpy staff. It's with that in mind that we hailed the launch of the five-level demo for Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. The sequel to Puzzle Quest adds quite a few new features to the game, and a little time in the demo will show skeptics why this game is a more than worthy member of our 2009 "Most Wanted" list.

Six Degrees of Freedom

The first thing players will notice when they fire up the Galactrix demo is that there's now at least the illusion of more freedom. The universe of Galactrix is split up into a huge number of star systems linked by a series of star gates. Most of these will be locked at the beginning of the game and will have to be hacked open. Unlike the original game's towns, which consisted merely of menus, each star system in Galactrix has a number of planets, space stations and asteroids for the player to visit. Each of these will have their own quests or challenges. Asteroids, for example, are used to mine resources that can be sold or crafted into starship components on space stations.

Each star system will also sport a number of spacecraft zipping around. These are independent ships that owe allegiance to one of the game's four megacorporate factions or the pirates. While not necessary, attacking these ships will affect the player's reputation with the factions, and being loved or hated by that particular faction will open up new missions and other opportunities throughout the game. The first few missions (identified by a flashing square around a celestial body) don't touch on this, however. They're about learning to fly the ship between worlds and eventually challenging a pirate vessel to single combat.

It's the first combat where both newbies and Puzzle Quest veterans will learn how different fighting is in this particular RPG. All combat and many of the game's other activities revolve around a "match-3" style game in which players must slide gems back and forth to make strings of three or more like-colored gems. The kicker is that unlike classic versions of these games, Galactrix uses hexagonal gems that can slide in any of six different directions. This can be particularly confusing because it creates opportunities for matching that may not be immediately obvious to players familiar with the original.

In our case, the biggest issue we had was trying to figure out from which direct gems would slide once we had made a match. The direction gems in Galactrix slide in completely dependent on the first gem players click on when moving them around. If, for example, two gems are directly above one another, sliding the upper gem downward will cause new gems to fall "down" toward the bottom of the screen. Sliding the bottom gem upward will cause the new gems to slide "up" toward the top. As players get better at identifying potential matches, this will grow to have a profound impact on the game. Clicking the wrong gem could be the difference between simply getting a three-gem match and triggering a cascade that can devastate an opponent.